“I Learned Pretty Much Everything I Know About Jazz from Ed Love”
Ed Love’s friend and colleague Jon Moshier celebrates Ed with a very special song selection.
I’ve been fortunate to have known Ed professionally and as a friend working together here at WDET for over 20 years. But I was introduced to the sounds of Ed Love by my late father.
“I learned pretty much everything I know about jazz from Ed Love and much of how I learned to be a professional broadcaster as well. For these things, I’ll always love and respect my old friend.”
You see, as a kid, the living room stereo played Ed’s show every night starting way back in the early 1980s, long before I would ever be on the radio myself.
Complementing the influence of people like “The Electrifying Mojo”, Ed’s show here in Detroit helped spark my love for radio, with a nightly education into the deep history of jazz, straight from a man who lives and breathes it, alongside a lot of the very legends who made it. So much so that Ed was already a legend himself in the world of jazz, especially here in Detroit.
Click on the audio player above to hear Jon Moshier, Ed Love’s friend and colleague, pay tribute to Ed
I learned pretty much everything I know about jazz from Ed Love and much of how I learned to be a professional broadcaster as well. For these things, I’ll always love and respect my old friend.
I remember many, many years ago on Ed’s show, he was focusing on giving us a lesson about bebop and hard-bop styles of jazz. On that particular show, in his own style, he informed us multiple times that, “If it’s bop, it’s jazz, but if it’s jazz, it’s not necessarily bop, you dig?”
With that memorable lesson, and with the memory of my late father, I’d like to present to you a composition from the late, great pianist Horace Silver, a pioneer in the hard-bop style, especially with his work alongside Art Blakey and the jazz messengers. This pick, his most famous and released in 1965, is the composition he wrote for his father, called “Song for My Father.” It is a song that I most assuredly first heard on Ed Love’s radio show, played by my father on that living room stereo.
This one’s for you, Ed. Congratulations on 60 years behind the mic here in Detroit. Thanks for everything and keep swingin’.
Artist: Horace Silver
Track: Song For My Father
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